I tour the Dallas home of Aubrey Butcher, co-founder — with her husband Kale — of the tile and stone company Riad Tile, and come away with an idea I'm calling the volume control panel: the sense that every room has a dial for what gets noticed first, and most decorating advice only teaches you how to turn it down.

Aubrey works both ends of it. Throughout her home, she takes what designers call the envelope of a room — the ceiling, floor, and walls — along with the large pieces of furniture, and pushes those elements toward quiet: a sectional sofa painted the exact same color as the wall behind it, built-in cabinets painted to disappear into the walls around them, drapery hung with the hardware hidden so panels fall straight from the ceiling with nothing to interrupt the line. Then, because she and Kale spend their careers sourcing tile and stone from quarries and factories around the world, she uses that same material to turn the volume back up exactly where she wants it — dramatic marble at the fireplace, the kitchen backsplash, and the bar; a striped tile pattern that runs floor to wall in the laundry room.

This episode is a full room-by-room tour of that home, plus a conversation about how one overpriced bathroom tile led Aubrey and Kale to Morocco, a shipping container, and eventually Riad Tile — and a plain-language walkthrough of how to actually choose between stone, ceramic, porcelain, zellige, cement, and terrazzo tile.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Myquillyn Smith — known to many as The Cozy Minimalist and author of the new book House Hushing — to talk about what actually tells you when you have too much stuff in a room.

Myquillyn's method is called backwards decluttering: instead of picking up every object and asking whether it sparks joy, you clear a room down to its furniture and function, live in it stripped-down for a day or two, and only let things back in once you've proven — by missing them — that they belong. It's decluttering by experience rather than by interrogation, and it works because a room that already feels good gives you the confidence to let more go.

Partway through our conversation, I named something I'm calling the Ten-Minute Threshold. Myquillyn's approach trusts the gut — how does this room feel — and I think that instinct is exactly right. But I also think there's a concrete, measurable way to check that gut feeling: if a room takes you more than about ten minutes to reset back to a state that feels good, you own too much for that space. Not too much by any universal standard — too much for you. It's not a rule about quantity. It's a diagnostic for friction.

In this companion episode, I share my takeaways from touring the home of Amy Dutton, an interior designer based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whose 1920s bungalow she and her husband gutted and rebuilt while raising three kids. What I found there is what I'm calling the whole Slow Style framework in one bungalow — a single house where all three of my design principles and all five of my design elements show up at once, without ever being assembled off a checklist.

This isn't a home tour episode. It's a reflection on why Amy's home works — architecturally, emotionally, and aesthetically — and what any listener can take from it, regardless of their own home's size, age, or style. A separate bonus video episode, the full room-by-room home tour with Amy, is available for paying subscribers.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Ali Milam, managing director of Porta Romana — a family-founded English lighting and furniture house based in the English countryside, known for handcrafted work across casting, forging, ceramics, glassblowing, and its own in-house painting studio — to collect the origin stories behind some of their most striking pieces.

Nearly every object in Porta Romana's collection traces back to a specific, often unexpected moment: a museum exhibit, a garden, a dog walk, a bag of mussels bought for dinner. This episode moves through several of those stories in detail, including exactly how a wall light shaped like a cluster of mussel shells came to be cast from real mussels, one shell at a time.

This episode also covers Porta Romana's collaboration with fashion-influenced artist Gergei Erdei and its recent B Corp certification.

This episode starts with a paint color and ends up somewhere I didn't expect — a whole chain of handmade decisions moving through my office, my bedroom, and beyond. Curtains made from a friend's Spoonflower pattern pulled straight from a vintage French fabric I'd been hoarding. A pleated lampshade with no sewing involved. A tall, unloved dresser was swapped for an antique cupboard I found after two weeks of watching Facebook Marketplace. A vanity skirted the way Debbie Matthews taught me. A stool recovered with a pair of vintage embroidered place mats I didn't even know I'd use until I needed them.

By the end, I landed on the thing I actually believe about handmade: it was never a purchase category to begin with. It's a relationship — with the person who made something, with where you found it, with the version of yourself who made it imperfectly and kept going anyway.

I sit down with Danielle Postel-Vinay — a New York Times book columnist and, under the name Danielle Trussoni, an award-winning novelist — to talk about her book Home Sweet Maison: The French Art of Making a Home. Danielle spent five years living in France, married into a French family, and studied French domestic life from the inside.

This episode is about what I'm calling home as a vessel for your vision of life. It's a reframe of an idea I talk about often — that your home is a visual autobiography — pushed a step further. A visual autobiography can tip inward, into something self-focused. A vessel for your vision of life is outward-facing: a home built to carry what you value and offer it, on purpose, to the people who enter it. Danielle's book and our conversation are full of examples of what that looks like in practice, room by room.

We cover the French entrée (entryway), the salon, the salle à manger (dining room), the boudoir, and the daily ritual of the six o'clock apéro — and what each of those spaces reveals about a culture that treats a home as a deliberate offering rather than a passive backdrop.

My conversation with Los Angeles designer Kim Gordon is about setting an intention before you design anything at all. Kim asks a house what it wants to be before she draws a single floor plan, and she treats the senses — not the color palette — as the true starting point of a room.

This episode comes from our archives and therefore it's the full length version.  The podcast is on break for two weeks.  Subscribe to hear all of the new full length episodes! 

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Julia Collins, the London-based founder of the art advisory Collins and Green, to talk about how to actually look at a painting — no art history degree required.

Julia has real academic art credentials: courses at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a master's degree from Christie's. But when she walks a client — or me — through a painting, she almost never starts there. Instead she names the one detail that actually caught her: a color balance, a blank face, a mysterious jug in a still life. This is what I'm calling how to look at art — the practice of noticing your own reaction to a piece before reaching for technicality, provenance, or price, and staying with that reaction long enough to ask why it's there.

This episode is a room-by-room, painting-by-painting walk through Julia's own collection — mostly 20th-century French and Scandinavian work — and a demonstration of a method anyone can use, whether you're standing in a major museum or your own hallway.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Maida Korte — a Chicago-area interior designer and the author of the new memoir Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me — to talk about what happens when a renovation refuses to move at your pace, and what it costs (and gives back) to finally let it.

Maida set out to write a practical book about renovating a hundred-year-old house in Woodstock, Illinois. What she discovered while writing it is what I’m calling here loosening: the process of giving up the need to control the outcome — on the house, and eventually on everything else. Maida had spent her career as a designer running a tight ship, getting things done on schedule. The house wouldn’t allow it. And letting go of that grip, she says, is what actually made her a better wife, mother, and friend.

This episode covers the full arc: the compromise that got a self-described city girl to leave Chicago, the string of disasters that came with an aging house, the room that became the heart of the home, and the moment an artisan said something about the house that made her realize the book had never really been about the house at all.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Debbie Mathews, an interior designer and antiques dealer based in Nashville, Tennessee, to look through a curated selection of her portfolio — from a sunroom in the Belle Meade neighborhood to a working ranch outside Franklin, Tennessee, to a mountain house living room with 30-foot ceilings. What this episode makes visible is something I'm calling the space between the ask and the answer: the ordinary, specific problem a client hands a designer — a room that goes unused, a space that feels too formal, an object nobody wants to see — and the beautiful, considered decisions a designer makes to answer it.

This isn't a portrait of an unusual designer or unusual clients. Debbie's clients are typical: they know a few basics about what they want — a color, a piece of furniture they already love — and rely on her aesthetic judgment for everything else. That's a completely normal client relationship. What makes this episode useful is how clearly you can watch it happen, room after room, with the specific decisions named out loud.

In this solo episode, I'm going deep on one of the five physical elements of every Slow Style home — and arguably the most personal one: Heritage and Culture.

It's about heritage as authorship. Not just the objects you've inherited, but the idea that your personal history — however much of it you know, however complicated it is, however far back it goes — is a story you get to write, edit, and hand forward. Most people treat their heirlooms as decorating problems. I want to reframe them as creative resources.

In this episode, specific objects from my own home and the stories behind them, how to handle heritage when it's complicated, why the house itself has a history worth honoring, what to bring home from the world when you travel with intention, and the room in my house that proves you don't have to inherit heritage — you can make it.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Liz Williams — an interior designer based in Atlanta, Georgia, known for her work with symmetry, elegance, and what I've started calling the last decision — to look through a curated selection of her portfolio. We move through a grand formal home on the Chattahoochee River, a barn conversion in Madison, Georgia, a show house primary bedroom in a high-rise, and several other projects, stopping at the details that most rooms never get and most homeowners talk themselves out of.

The last decision is the finishing detail: the trim on the pillow gusset, the tape on the curtain hem, the nail head tracing the curve of a wingback chair. Not the focal point, not the statement piece — the thing that comes after all of those, when a room is almost done but not quite complete. Liz takes this step in every room she designs, across every style and scale. And once you see it, you understand immediately what most rooms are missing.

The slide deck from this episode is available below — browse the portfolio images alongside the takeaways, or watch the full episode as a subscriber.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Danielle Nicholson — interior designer and author of the renovation planning guide Don’t Start Without Me — to talk about the single most preventable cause of renovation regret: starting before you’ve done the thinking.

Danielle has spent 18 years watching clients arrive at renovation projects underprepared — not because they lacked taste or budget, but because they skipped the step that makes everything else work. The vision before the visit: the quiet, intentional thinking about how you actually want to live in a space, done before the contractor is called, before the showroom appointments are made, before a single finish is selected.

This episode covers the full scope of what that preparation looks like: how to think about function before aesthetics, how to renovate in stages without losing coherence, how to work with contractors and designers without handing over your vision, and why the pressure to “just get it done” is the enemy of every renovation outcome worth having.

In this Designers at Home episode, I tour the home of Jill Litner Kaplan, a Boston-area interior designer whose approach to decorating stopped me in my tracks — not because it's flashy or maximalist, but because of a single idea I couldn't stop thinking about after I left.

Walking through Jill's home, I kept noticing the objects and their stories long before I noticed anything else. The antique Buddha in the entryway, draped in jewels she added herself. The stingray shagreen dining table beneath a 1930s Sputnik chandelier. The hot pink cut velvet sofa her mother found after years of searching. And only somewhere in the middle of the living room did I realize: there is a lot of pink in here.

The color was there the whole time. The stories just got there first.

This is what I'm calling color as emergent from story — the idea that in the most compelling homes, color isn't a strategy you apply. It's a consequence of collecting objects that mean something. When you choose things because they move you, the palette takes care of itself. And the result feels more cohesive, not less, because it's rooted in something true.

This episode is a full home tour with Jill — room by room, object by object — and a masterclass in what visual storytelling actually looks like in a home.

What does a 2007 issue of Domino have in common with a room you'd design today? More than you'd think.

In this episode, I dig through a stack of old design magazines — Domino, Flea Market Style, House Beautiful, Veranda, and Country Living, spanning 2007 to 2019 — and ask the question I find myself returning to constantly: what still holds up?

We talk suzanis, suzanis (yes, still), the case for painting all four walls instead of just one, why the humble breakfast nook deserves a comeback, and what the best white kitchens actually have in common. I share my ongoing plinth hunt, make a confession about Country Living being my Bible in the late '90s, and make a gentle but firm plea for the death of the accent wall.

If you've got a pile of old tear sheets, a half-finished vignette, or a dining room that could use some bookshelves — this one's for you.

In this episode:

• What Domino got right about sustainability back in 2007

• Minimalism vs. maximalism — and why neither is ever really "out"

• The case for the jewel box room (powder rooms, butler's pantries, and going all out in small spaces)

• Layered window treatments, bed canopies, and other things that keep coming back around

• Why I think the accent wall's days are numbered

• Treating your kitchen and bathroom like actual rooms

This week's episode is a little different — and honestly, a little vulnerable for me. After ten years and more than 400 episodes of Slow Style Home, I'm pulling back the curtain on what it's really taken to create this podcast, and why I've decided to make a significant change. I've always believed that what we choose to surround ourselves with reflects what we truly value, and lately I've been turning that same lens on my own work. I've reached a point where I need to ask an honest question: Is what I'm creating something you value enough to support? So I'm shifting to a mostly paid model — not as a sales tactic, but as a way to align my work with what it's actually worth and to connect more deeply with the people who genuinely feel that pull toward creating a meaningful home. This isn't about pressure or persuasion. It's about making an intentional choice (the same kind I talk about all the time) and finally being willing to stand behind the value of what I've built.

This has never been about adding more noise to the world. It’s always been about helping you create a home that feels meaningful…on your terms.

I keep thinking about how often we walk into a gallery already convinced we don’t belong there and how quickly that belief starts to shape what we choose. In this week's episode, I sit down with gallery owner Liz Lidgett to talk about her new book “Art Is For Everyone”. Because collecting art isn’t about having the right words or the right budget, it’s about being willing to notice your own reactions and trust them. We talked about how your taste develops through exposure—by looking at a lot of art, by saying no without apology, and by getting curious about why something pulls you in. A good gallerist isn’t there to judge you; they’re there to help you translate those instincts into something tangible. And yes, we got into the practical side: price, scale, the mistake of buying small just because it feels safer, but what matters more is understanding that art isn’t meant to match your room, it’s meant to lead it. When you let yourself buy from that emotional place, you’re not just filling a wall, you’re creating a home that reflects you in a way nothing else really can.

In this episode of the Designers at Home series, I take you inside the home of designer Jo Berryman, a space that, to me, perfectly embodies what it means to honor both history and personal expression. As we move through her home together, I’m struck by how effortlessly she blends old and new, preserving original architectural details while layering in sculptural, modern elements and deeply personal touches. What I love most is how grounded her approach is in nature; nothing feels overly forced or decorated for decoration’s sake. Instead, there’s this beautiful sense of rhythm, of organic shapes, of materials aging and evolving over time. It’s a reminder that our homes don’t need to be perfect or finished—they just need to feel considered, alive, and reflective of who we are.

Are you in the middle of a major life transition and feeling stuck between who you were and who you’re becoming? This episode is for you.

Whether you’re navigating a career change, an empty nest, a move, or just a season of life that feels uncertain, your home doesn’t have to sit on pause while you wait for things to settle. In fact, the in-between might be the perfect time to start.

In this episode we’re talking about why style evolves — and why that’s actually a good thing. You’ll hear the story of my own living room evolution (including a red couch, a blue chair, yellow walls, and what I can only describe as a kindergarten classroom) and the five hard-won design lessons that came out of it.

You’ll also learn:

• Why you’re more creative than you think — and what creativity actually means when it comes to your home

• How to let go of what you’ve outgrown without guilt

• Why buying things to match is a trap, and what to do instead

• How to think about trends so you don’t get burned

• A simple, low-stakes exercise you can try this weekend to start training your eye

Your home can reflect who you’re becoming — even before you fully arrive. Let’s get into it.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Rachel Ashwell, and what stayed with me most wasn’t just her iconic aesthetic; it was her mindset. We talked about her move back to the English countryside, her need for the rhythm of the seasons, and how she approaches her home as something always evolving, never finished. From embracing “leftovers” and layering pieces with history, to letting go of perfection and even her own hesitation around bold choices, she reminded me that a home isn’t about getting it right, it’s about letting it reflect who you are in the moment… and giving yourself permission to keep changing.